31–40 of 85 posts
"The current UI is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out." Let's be honest. Don't attribute it to the system complexity or interop failures — that's bullshit. When they need to shove you an ads under your finger, the complexity suddenly vanishes.
I've tried to follow the links from the article and eventually came across this document [0] What the attorney general Brnovich references are emails which shows google engineers are aware that people are confused by the settings. The specific example in this case is that your location is still tracked if you enabled Web & App Activity, but disabled Location. The emails show the google engineers aren't surprised why…
There's a usability aspect to this. If you disable location services for Yelp, it's pretty unfriendly -- it chooses to make it as difficult as possible for you to use the app to get you to turn location back on. The Google approach for Maps is more pragmatic IMO -- lower resolution location data makes sure I don't get a McDonald's in Finland when I'm in Kentucky. The hard thing is that I don't want Yelp, Google, etc…
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Absent legislation, I'm all for a "nuke it all" approach when it comes to ad-blocking and tracker-blocking. It won't catch everything, especially platform-level privacy concerns like this, but it does move good usable defaults over to the user's control. No need to rely on companies who continue to fail to act in good faith.
You can't block an app or site from accessing your geolocatable IP workout extreme measures.
This isn't a surprise. Google is a huge company with probably hundreds of teams working on these things. The fact that the privacy settings can be figured out at all is a bit of a miracle. I doubt the privacy settings are "designed" as much as it is a bunch of disparate teams working on it together with maybe somebody coordinating it.
Sort your shit out or prepare to have hostile regulators take a bat to your business model.
There's a usability aspect to this. If you disable location services for Yelp, it's pretty unfriendly -- it chooses to make it as difficult as possible for you to use the app to get you to turn location back on. The Google approach for Maps is more pragmatic IMO -- lower resolution location data makes sure I don't get a McDonald's in Finland when I'm in Kentucky. The hard thing is that I don't want Yelp, Google, etc…
Maybe people could just live with having to search: " near " if they want to get geographically relevant results. It doesn't seem that terrible to me.
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Maybe people could just live with having to search: " near " if they want to get geographically relevant results. It doesn't seem that terrible to me.
and then you live in London, ON - Canada, and search for Best places to eat in London... Or you live in the US city of Vancouver instead of Canada and try the same thing...
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You can't block an app or site from accessing your geolocatable IP workout extreme measures.
Is that true even for IPv6?
"The current UI is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out." Let's be honest. Don't attribute it to the system complexity or interop failures — that's bullshit. When they need to shove you an ads under your finger, the complexity suddenly vanishes.
Isn't that the point?
There's a usability aspect to this. If you disable location services for Yelp, it's pretty unfriendly -- it chooses to make it as difficult as possible for you to use the app to get you to turn location back on. The Google approach for Maps is more pragmatic IMO -- lower resolution location data makes sure I don't get a McDonald's in Finland when I'm in Kentucky. The hard thing is that I don't want Yelp, Google, etc…